Something unusual took place at the Hague Inquisition (ICTY) last week. The quasi-court, claiming nonexistent authority from the UN Security Council to prosecute war crimes during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, convicted two Croatian generals of war crimes. This was strange for two reasons. First, because so far the Inquisition has indicted only a few non-Serbs, and only a few of those were sentenced to anything beyond symbolic terms. Second, because while non-Serb defendants were tried for individual atrocities, only Serb defendants were prosecuted under the doctrine of “joint criminal enterprise,” specifically developed for them. Until now.

The prosecutors claimed, and the judges agreed, that Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac were both part of the "joint criminal enterprise" to forcibly displace the Serb population from Croatia in the summer of 1995. According to the Inquisition, the JCE was headed by none other than Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, who died in 1999. The third general on trial, Ivan Cermak, was acquitted of all charges.

Shock and Anger

Croatian officials, as well as a sizeable part of the public, greeted the verdict with shock and anger. There have been riots throughout the country. Soccer teams have played wearing General Gotovina’s picture on their jerseys. One man even cut himself up with broken glass in protest.

Croatians are fiercely protective of the narrative of what they call the "Homeland War"; in this official history, the peace-loving Croatian state was brutally attacked by the aggressive, expansionist Serbia and the Yugoslav Army, who proceeded to slaughter Croats and "occupy a third of Croatian territory" for years, until the heroic "defenders" forced them out and secured the country’s independence. It is an article of faith in Croatia, challenged only by a few (and at great peril) that, since all their actions were supposedly in righteous self-defense, nothing any Croatian soldier has done could have possibly been illegal or immoral.

This does not apply only to generals and wartime politicians; when a common soldier, Tihomir Purda, was arrested on a Serbian warrant in February this year, crowds of protesters turned out to demand his release.

There are obvious problems with this narrative. First, neither the crumbling Yugoslav government nor that of Serbia ever contested Croatia’s declaration of independence per se. They were, however, concerned with Tudjman’s disenfranchisement of the country’s half a million Serbs, who had good reasons to feel uncomfortable in an independent Croatia. The territory that ended up under Serb control consisted largely of areas inhabited by Serbs, not "invaded" from Serbia — a distinction most Western journalists never bothered to make. Finally, the notion that atrocities are by definition impossible in a just war is nonsensical, being the extreme expression of the belief that the end justifies the means.

Junkyard Dogs

Unable to make that argument before the ICTY, Croatia’s lawyers defending the generals argued that the August 1995 operation that saw the murder and expulsion of Serbs and the widespread destruction of their property was a legitimate military action supported by the U.S. government.

It is true that Washington was behind "Operation Storm", having trained and equipped the Croatian military through the "private contractor" MPRI. There are numerous testimonies about this, including one in Richard Holbrooke’s memoir of his colleague Robert Frasure referring to the Croats as America’s "junkyard dogs," about whose methods one ought not get "squeamish."

At the time, Washington’s Ambassador to Zagreb, Peter Galbraith, even denied that the exodus of Serbs could be qualified as "ethnic cleansing," since ethnic cleansing was something only the Serbs would do! He repeated that qualification following the verdict, arguing that the Serbs left of their own volition.

Yet the Inquisition has repeatedly asserted that it had no authority over anyone but the nationals of the former Yugoslavia — other participants in the conflict, such as U.S. and NATO troops, could never face indictment. It is unclear whether Croatia’s defense attorneys thought that by bringing up U.S. support they would have the indictment withdrawn or get their American sponsors indicted; either way, the Empire did what it usually does, and threw its "junkyard dogs" under the proverbial bus once they’d served their purpose.

The Tudjman Tapes

The crucial evidence the Inquisition used were the transcripts of taped meetings of President Tudjman, which leave little doubt as to his plans to eliminate Croatia’s Serb population, and even meddle in Bosnia. While Croatia’s current president, Ivo Josipovic, walked the tightrope between acknowledging the tapes’ authenticity and continuing to assert that Croatia’s war effort (and the persecution of Serbs it entailed) was nonetheless legitimate, the Croatian public has gone on a witch hunt for whoever leaked the tapes to the ICTY. Yet for all we know, it might have been the Empire that did it.

Questions of Legitimacy

The doctrine of "joint criminal enterprise" was developed for the Inquisition by a Croat-American law professor, as a sort of catch-all concept that enabled the prosecution of people not for what they did, but for who they were at the time. In a nutshell, simply being in a position of authority was enough to convict someone on grounds that they "should have known" what their subordinates were doing. Best yet, according to the ICTY, one could belong to the JCE without even knowing it! This has enabled the Inquisition to accuse the entire Serb political and military leadership — in today’s Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia — of being parts of a grand conspiracy to establish a "Greater Serbia"; it was a charge the Inquisition itself didn’t take seriously, but it made good headlines.

In this light, it is understandable that a verdict based on this doctrine would make the Croatians nervous. After all, its principal function over the years has been to de-legitimize the Serb war efforts. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, the Inquisition’s ministrations seem far less pleasant.

The Oric Scenario

However, there is little indication that the Inquisition is seriously interested in questioning the legitimacy of Tudjman’s war effort. As noted earlier, the Empire was a key participant in the conflict. Croatia joined NATO a few years ago, and seems on track to join the EU soon enough. And while mass refugee returns have been a major policy objective of Washington and Brussels in Bosnia, no such effort was made to ensure the return of the displaced Serbs. In fact, regardless of which party is in charge, Croatia continues to deny the property and civil rights to the returnees, and discourages any serious return by randomly accusing Serb men of war crimes.

Further suggesting the political calculation behind the convictions is the fact that the third defendant, Gen. Cermak, was acquitted on all counts. The very point of the JCE doctrine is that it is practically impossible to get acquitted, once charged: the defendant is guilty by the virtue of existing. Unless Cermak somehow managed to prove he did not exist at the time, his acquittal is as puzzling as Gotovina and Markac’s convictions.

It would not be out of the realm of possibility to posit that Gotovina and Markac might eventually be sentenced to time served, or even outright acquitted, following the appeals process. That’s precisely what happened to the Bosnian Muslim warlord Naser Oric. The reason the generals were indicted and convicted in the first place could well be to bolster the feeble fiction of impartiality and legitimacy of the ICTY, and the JCE doctrine itself. Either way, it is extremely unlikely that either the Inquisition or its sponsors in Europe and the U.S. have suddenly developed empathy for Serb suffering.

Fallout

None of this is helping the Croatians cope. For years, their governments had told them that their side was virtuous and pure, their cause just and unimpeachable. Now just one verdict before the Hague Inquisition seems to have thrown that perception into disarray. There has already been much anger aimed at the government, which is mired in corruption scandals and trying to cope with mounting debt and unemployment. The verdict has actually enabled the government to avoid dealing with its dubious record since the independence, and hide behind appeals to patriotism and a growing victimhood complex.

As for the Serbs, ICTY’s gesture of feigned even-handedness is too little, too late. Railroading someone else for once isn’t going to change the realization that the Inquisition’s basic mission is to rewrite recent Balkans history for Empire’s benefit. The Gotovina verdict merely shows that in that mission, they are now willing to trample over yesterday’s proxies. Of actual justice for the Balkans, there is nary a trace.

It's interesting to compare Milosevic's speeches with Tudjman's "Wastelands of Historical Truth". You have to really use your imagination to construe Tudjman's writing as something other than a violent, holocaust-denying ideology. On the other hand, it's a work of propoganda par excellence that has people believing that Milosevic ever incited ethnic hatred–in a public speech, anyway. But he was party to a "Joint Criminal Enterprise", so I guess that doesn't matter.

Visitor

More malice from Malic. Serb propagandist ultra-nationalist. Ho-hum.

Milorad

Resorting to empty ad hominem attacks shows either how shallow your argument is or how lazy you are or both. Poor effort Visitor.

Kresimir

"The verdict has actually enabled the government to avoid dealing with its dubious record since the independence, and hide behind appeals to patriotism and a growing victimhood complex."

It is truly a laughing stock to see a Serb (more so a Serb nationalist like Mr. Malic) pointing his finger's at someone's "victimhood complex". When it is known that victimhood is a notorious Serb specialty. Almost all of their propaganda boils down to whining about the second world war (Jasenovac etc), about how Serbs have been victimized, murdered, the about the supposed "demonization by the Western media" etc. We were bombed, booh-hooh. Serbs mocking at someone else's victimhood complex is like the proverbial whore pontificating about chastity. In Croatia victimhood is marginal, while among Serbs it is mainstream.

Kresimir

"The verdict has actually enabled the government to avoid dealing with its dubious record since the independence, and hide behind appeals to patriotism and a growing victimhood complex."

It is truly laughing stock to see a Serb (more so a Serb nationalist like Mr. Malic) pointing his finger's at someone's "victimhood complex". When it is known that victimhood is a notorious Serb specialty. Almost all of their propaganda boils down to whining about the second world war (Jasenovac etc), about how Serbs have been victimized, murdered, then about the supposed "demonization by the Western media" etc. We were bombed, booh-hooh. Serbs mocking at someone else's victimhood complex is like the proverbial whore pontificating about chastity. In Croatia victimhood is marginal, while among Serbs it is mainstream.

Kresimir

It is also amazing that Serb nationalists like to complain about the atrocities in the Operation Storm in 1995, but never mention the Serb atrocities over Croats, 1991-95. What happened in the "Operation Storm" was that many people thought they should exact revenge over Serbs for what they were doing during four years. It was a payback, no matter how unfortunate indeed. There was no hatred against Serbs in Croatia prior to the year 1991, but once Serbs did what they did, many people started hating Serbs as collectivity and I don't see it changing in near future. The year 1991 was the cause of the year 1995, plain and simple. Because of that year (1991) many Croats started to cheer at anything that harms Serbia. So, for example, many cheered at NATO's bombings and deaths of Serb civilians, and supported the independence of Kosovo, only because it harms Serbia. For no other reasons (not that those people like Albanians). Because of this accumulated hate, the best thing is to keep relations between two countries at a minimum. Meetings of Tadic and Josipovic and their gibberish about reconcialiation in the region and cooperation withn a united Europe are thus totally counter-productive.

Chris

Please enlighten us on Serb "atrocities over Croats, 1991-95".

I've read literally thousands of articles on the matter, including Malic over the last 13 years or so (I think it's been 13 years) and I would love to know what these "Serb atrocities over Croats, 1991-95" were.

To not understand why Serbs feel themselves to be victims (regardless of whether they deserve to be victomized) is to border on idiocy.

Kresimir

Serbs who are triumphant over these verdicts (I know Malic is not one of them) may soon lose the smile from their faces. This verdict, if anything, deepens divisions and hatred between Croats and Serbs and sets the stage for new antagonisms. And you know who profits? The advocates of unitary Bosnia, that is, "Bosniaks" (Muslims) and the Empire (as Mr. Malic calls it), both of whom stand for united Bosnia at any cost. Efforts of Bosnian Croats to oppose the rule by "majorization" imposed upon them by Sarajevo government have been severely condemned by the US representative in Bosnia. At the same time, a cudgel is being prepared to discipline the Republika Srpska, in the view of the referendum Dodik has announced to hold. Threats – even with the use of military force! – have been made these days by some western (former?) diplomats, aimed at anyone who would dare question the "territorial integrity" of Bosnia. It is highly unlike (nay, impossible) for the Republika Srpska to be abolished, but it is not unlikely it could be put under some special regime of supervisions, with their legitimate poltical representatives stripped of their functions, by the so-called "high representative of the international community". It has happened before.

Karl

No worries. The Croats and Serbs in BiH are finally cooperating. In the end, we will prevail against the damned international gang.

Kresimir

I agree basically with Mr. Malic that this court is totally illegitimate. I was on the side of Milosevic when he was tried their, and on the side of any other Serb who was brough before that tribunal. Of course, as a Croat, I am opposed to them as politicians and to everything they stand for, but I was on their side in as much as they were indictees of the Hague Inquisition. Unfortunately, in the Balkans many cheer at decisions of the Hague Tribunal when it condemns those of the "other side", while they curse that court when it condems those from "our side".

Chris Herz

I had relatives, highly decorated American soldiers, who had to fight against those syling themselves both "Chetnik" and "Ustasha" in World War II. I wish a plague on all their houses.
Tito had the right idea for all these violent ultra-nationalists: Find them a nice little island in the Adriatic and set them to work cracking rocks.
As for these international courts; they seem to imitate our local US courts: With all rigor prosecute the low-level street crooks and even a few capo-regimi, but leave untouched the big shots in Rome, Frankfurt, London and New York who financed and profited mightily by it all.

Nikola

You are talking nonsense. Tito created this whole mess in the first place.

Milorad

You obviously don't realize that President Truman praised the Chetniks for their valor and even awarded the Legion of Merit to their leader General Draza Mihajlovic for rescuing over 500 downed US airmen. Churchill in his memoirs regretted not supporting the Chetniks and allowing the allies to be duped by a communist mole during the war by falsifying reports in favor of Tito and to the detriment of Draza. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Klugmann
Learn history before you spew ignorance and embarrass your "highly decorated American" relatives.

And I suppose you consider Guantánamo and the "Patriot" acts to be good things too.

Karl

The opening paragraph is inaccurate. The ICTY indicted 29 Bosnian Croats. That is more than just a few. 6 of them are charged with a "Joint Criminal Enterprise".

Michael Kenny

The amusing thing about all of this is that the only loser is the US and its Israeli master! Every time something like this happens, it reminds Europeans of the disaster the US bamboozled them into, still on-gonig 20 years later. The whole Yugoslav scam was designed to be a dry run for "turning NATO around" and making it into a source of cannon fodder to defend Israel. By blowing up in everybody's face, it made Europe reluctant over Afghanistan, unwilling over Iraq and Iran was the bridge too far. By continuing to blow up in everybody's faces, it confirms European leaders in that position. Sidebar: Dick Marty announced yesterday that he is not running for re-election in October.

conumishu

The message delivered by this kind of justice is pretty clear: fight to the last, don't bother with moral restraints, it doesn't matter anyway, "we" the "untouchable" decide what's right and wrong. It seems the message has been heard. Many globalist imperialists believe it could be good for business to have more "losers" to kill, not to mention the bonus of "patriotic" infringements on individuals' liberty in the metropolises. And how hugely it's going to backfire!

conumishu

There's a big difference though. Croats, under western protection, grabbed most of what they wanted, Serbs lost almost eveything. Several scapegoats for territories already "cleansed" is not such a high price to pay. Of course, being among the favored imperial servants doesn't make you less servant.

Funny, the Croats (and others) don't seem to realize that making a fuss, "protesting", showing perhaps genuine (even if misplaced) anger wouldn't matter a bit if they weren't already assigned a "positive" role in the play. When the wheel turns, they could all be angels but nothing would prevent the dark depiction reserved for the "bad guys". In fact, that kind of reaction was expected as part of the props needed for the (so called) court "legitimacy".

What about it? That's the reason why I wrote for Croats "most of what they wanted". The Bosnian abnormality prevents them to achieve absolute "victory".

Yes, Serbs lost all their territories in Croatia, they lost Kosovo and Montenegro, Serb population was chased away from Croatia and Kosovo in very large numbers and even in Bosnia the territory they "control" is smaller than it should have been if ethnicity was the main criterion.

So, check if what you wrote had any sense before labeling.

Almedin Lipjankic

Hey, they did lose alot, they never got to accomplish their goal of Greater Serbia. They attacked all their neighbors, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia and didn't get them anywhere, now their country Serbia is falling apart piece by piece. Kosovo gone :P

andy

All I know is that America should have just minded its own business and stayed out of the Balkans.

eric siverson

Getting convicted in the Hague court does not mean much to me . I think Bush was certianly right to anounce this court can not try any americans . I sure wish The Russians , Chineese or Indians would come in and help straighten out all the nazi's that have taken over Yugoslavia . NAZI's are just running wild all over old Yugoslavia . Its just shamefull damn nazis evrey where . The Croat nazis , the bosnian nazis , the Albanian nazis , Just plainly too damn many nazis . I just hate nazis

zemoralist

Bush never said any such thing. You are confusing the permanent court ICC (Bush and Obama as Clinton before are all aginst US ratifying the Rome treaty that established ICC) and the ad hoc ICTY were the trials Malic is talking about took place, and Bush spent $100 mil per year to support ICTY (and ICTR) as does Obama.

eric siverson

I don't think I'am confused . I also think NATO themselves had a lot of problems , that the ICTY court promised not to ask about . I think It was the ICC court that asked both Blair and Clinton to come in and answer a few questions . Do you know if they ever showed up .

Mama Duck

Funny I hate stinking F**king Commies and their liberal kind!

Kresimir

Hahaha…Eric, you are ripe for some psychiatric treatment. Nah-tzees all around you, persecuting you.

B..

Oh, yeah. Croats DO NOT routinely deny their criminal "accomplishments" in Hitler's sick project from Jasenovac to Stalingrad, their youths DO NOT fill the nazi concerts (Marko Perkovic Thompson, anyone?) in TENS OF THOUSANDS at every single stadium from Zagreb to Split with all the nazi-flag waving frenzy, they DO NOT making the martyr mythology out of the nazi beasts ounished at Bleiburg, they DO NOT officially minimize Jasenovac to the point of some village brawl went nasty, and their "founding father" WAS NOT a psychotic Holocaust-denying, WW2 war criminals'-decorating Ustasha apologist (Tudjman). So, Eric got it all wrong and he deserves a psychiatric treatment (or a dark pit deep in the woods as I guess Kresimir would prefer, as his nation's favored way of dealing with the irritating truths and people).

You are a pathetic nazi promoter, Kresimir. And you know that the 1990s are long gone and the world is able to see and learn in a matter of nanoseconds how ugly and widesporead is the nazi psychosis in today's Croatia: from the street lumpens all the way to the highest-ranking officials in the goverment, clergy and academia. The cat is finally out of the bag. I'm so glad I'm not you.

Kresimir

Blah…blah… Visiting some psychiatric clinic wouldn't be a bad idea for you too, B.

Duglarri

I've travelled in Croatia over the past several years, and as a Canadian, I find the failure of the Croats to recognize what they ended up doing bemusing. I asked the local who was my contact there- an expatriate returnee, raised in Canada- about the many buildings in ruins in an area I was aware had seen no fighting. "Were the walls blown in or blown out?" he asked. Blown out, I responded. Those were the houses of Serbs who stayed, he said, who had gotten too uppity. Balkan tulips, he said. You put a propane tank in the middle of the house, wait about twenty minutes, and then fire at the house. The propane blows up and the walls of the house blow outward.

So Croatia achieved their aim: a country for Croats only. But what is the very first order of business of the Croats after the war? Repair and restore the tourist industry. Invite all these people who they didn't want living in "their" country- people like me, non-Croat, non-Catholic- invite us all to come back and vacation there. Soon they'll be part of the EU along with the Serbs. Some day there'll be hordes of Serbs sunning themselves along Croatian beaches again. And in the end, what will the Croats have achieved by all of this?

What did they gain by arming themselves and starting this war? And I say that as someone all of whose friends are Croats, not Serbs. I won't tell them this directly, but as a Canadian- this was madness. What they're going to end up with some day, is the multicultural society they fought a brutal war to prevent.

Karl

You don't get to have an opinion on Croats as long as your country continues to be a party to the international tyranny imposed on the part of our people in BiH. Should you get off your butt for long enough to get Canada out of PIC SB, then you can pass all the judgments on us you wish. Until that time your opinions are worthless trash talk coming from a foreign aggressor, colonialist, jailor, boot-stamper.

My government is not aggressing against you. Please return the favour. Have your government not aggress against me.

Mama Duck

Very well Spoken Duglarri. I have never been there but my reading of the situation and looking at it from all three sides seem to say the same thing. I'm an American and I firmly believe we should have kept our nose out of that mess!!

About Kresimir. So, we got a new Croatian troll here. And he's on the same intellectual level as his predecessors. Btw, has anyone noticed how they loved using names of Croatian mythological kings as pseudos.

Ah Croatia, that great European nation that gave us Giuseppe Verdi, uh, excuse me, "Josip Zeleni", and Marco Polo, uh excuse me, "Marko Puljic", and let's not forget that great scientist, son of a Croatian Orthodox priest, Nikola Tesla or that Nobel laureate, Ivo Andric, in spite of the fact that he declared himself to belong to Serbian literature. Croatia, the nation that doesn't bury victims but instead drops their bodies into pits of inaccessible depth…

You see, if you start using ad hominem fallacies, the only thing you can achieve is getting ridiculed.

Now, how about using some factual arguments?

paleo

The pits of Lika, Kordun, western Bosnia, and Herzegovina, and those up in Istria (the latter in which the victims were generally not Serbs or Jews, but Italians), are some of the most morbid instances of atrocity in the entirety of the Second World War. They ought to be better known. Whole chains of human beings (dozens to perhaps a hundred per group), with only a few of them bludgeoned whereas the rest were essentially dragged down alive by the dead, and the survivors were left to spend their last days and weeks dying of injury or starvation or exhaustion in the cavernous darkness, surrounded by rotting corpses.

I have Milorad Bajic's Jadovno documentary and have meant to have it translated and posted on Youtube for quite a while. Perhaps I'll get down to it this summer.

The Ustasha went so far as to pollute the land they claimed as theirs. They thought that they would manage to blot out the existence of tens of thousands of human beings by flinging them into the caverns out of the reach of gravediggers. All they managed to do was preserve the bones in these limestone pits so that tens or hundreds or thousands of years from now (a question that depends on when the Lord returns and when that territory falls into the hands of a civilized people) some archaeologists will dig down into these pits, uncover the tens of thousands of skeletons, and wonder what barbaric people it was (like the Carthaginians or the Druids) that perpetrated human sacrifice by throwing men, women, children, and infants into the abyss.

Suvorov

The junkyard dogs are back.

Kresimir

I know the defeat and the just punishment (Storm 1995) for the Serbian criminals is hard to stand.

The German have Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Goethe, Schiller, Kant… So, before eternity, 1933-1945 is just a detail in History. I could go on with telling you about the Russian, the French, the British, the Spanish, and yes even the Serbs. We can be accused of all the crimes in the world, there is enough in our History to earn us respect.

Before eternity, your History is 1941-1945 and 1991-1995. And you can bark at it all you want.

B..

Croats are the bravest people in the world, and not because they have no fear – but for the utter absence of shame. Jovan Ducic, a great Serbian poet

And you are also very brave. Because is very brave this chauvinistic crap termed poetry.

Suvorov

In fact the comparison with dogs is too flattering, and, what's important, is inaccurate when describing that kind of behaviour. It is jackals and hyenas who gather in packs to attack the sick, wounded, or old. But, hey, it was Dick Holbrooke who used that analogy. In any case, thanks for responding when your name was called; that's what dogs are trained to do.

Kresimir

Actually, we are fflattered when the likes of you pretend to be "insulting" us. It would be a matter of worry if such worthless nullities like you were praising us. So go on. Hehe…

A man of honour doesn't fear death. A man of honour fears nothing more than shame. You are indeed the bravest people in the world, because you have no honour.

B..

Apologies for the typos, written in a haste, here's the corrected version:

This is a pure nonsense. There is ABSOLUTELY NO other relations between Mihailovich's units and the US army during the WW2 other than warm and close friendship, solidarity and camaradery of a wartime alliance. The same goes for Tito's Partizans.

As for "nice little island in Adriatic", Chris, Tito's 1948' concentration camp at the Naked Island (Goli Otok) was not created for any "nationalist" but for the anti-fascist, Communist veterans who objected to Tito's treacherous politics to the Soviet Union, traditionally held as a closest ally among the Serbs. Some 500 people died at Goli Otok as a result of the sadist policy in the camp, tens of thousands got their lives, careers, properties and families traumatized and destroyed (often based on non-existent "crimes" : for example, there were people who got sent to Goli Otok for knowing Russian, or singing the beautiful Soviet wartime songs in the wrong company, or solely on the basis of getting snitched to the authorities as "Rusophiles" and "Stalinists" by some neighborhood informers).

Mocking their suffering is just monstrous

paleo

Let me also mention that it didn't help my grandfather that he was a Partisan from 1941 until the end, a physician, and a colonel. He was thrown into Goli Otok just the same. Truth be told, reflecting back on history, it's clear why Tito was so hysterical about Serbian Russophilia and the Mihailovic movement, because those were the two principle dangers to his reign: a Soviet-supported replacement of his dictatorship with a Serb-led regime or a Western-supported reconstitution of the Yugoslav monarchy and a return to the pre-WWII days. Hence, Serbs were his biggest enemies and biggest problems. He didn't have any problem with Albanian Ballists, the Ustase, or various SS divisions' supporters (Bosnian Muslims, etc.), since they had no political legitimacy anywhere after the fall of Hitler and weren't any sort of threat to his unchallenged reign.

Kresimir

This didn't prevent a large mass of Serbs, from both sides of Drina, from being Tito's lap dogs. In Serb majority regions of Croatia Tito was revered almost as some kind ofg saint.

Árpád Zoltán

It is about time for Vajdaság (so-called Vojvodina) to be separated from Serbia. It was unlawfully taken from Hungary in 1918 and has been held under occupation ever since (the only period of liberation was 1941-44, but only of Bácska). If Vajdaság cannot be Hungary again, at least it has to become civilized central European, multicultural state. It certainly doesn't belong together with backward, Balkanic, hopelessly chauvinistic and fascist Serbia. Serbia also has to apologize for its massacre of Hungarians in 1944.

Hrebeljanovic

I've got a better idea:

Why don't you Huns(that's what you are, aren't you?), with all of your barbaric, brutal, uncivilized murderous ways go back to where you came from. Only without you would Central Europe have peace and become civilized.

Suvorov

Keep your ugly dwarf kind away from Europe together with your SS Divisions, or you will be beaten again, as you were in every war you fought.

To be honest, I love Tokay and Hungarian girls are so attractive that if they wanted to, they could easily put all whores from elsewhere out of business. Hungary, land of brothels. A man's dreamland.

Darko

To be honest, you are really idiot.

VagyokPina

Magyarorszag -pornistan: full of pissy kinky whore girls speaking a hun dialect of mongolian and "civilized central european state" yeah with fascist guards around gypsy camps…

Rad Vuckov

To Arpad Zoltan, You describe as the "period of liberation l941-1944" of Vojvodina. During that time it was horrible massacre of the Serbs and Jews.

RAD VUCKOV

Why is my comment not published. Nothing insulting or obscene there.

Unrepentant Ustasha

This year we will have the most solemn and ostentatious celebration of the Victory Day in Croatia, August 5, the day when in 1995 the Serb aggressors were driven out from our country. We don't care what the world thinks about us. We don't give a damn about sentimental moralizers from the West who whine and snivel about "poor Serbs". We don't care about the Hague tribunal and its ridiculous "verdicts". The only important thing is that we liberated our country. The only important thing is the result. We don't apologize to anyone, we are not ashamed of anything, we don't give a damn about what some small bunch of sickly decadent pro-Serb pseudo-intellectuals from the West think about us. And you know why are we not ashamed and don't care? Because we are HEALTHY people. Healthy people don't indulge in sentimental idiocies and crying over spilled milk.

Unrepentant Ustasha

Serbs deserved that what befell them after the Operation Storm. Those bastards deserved some vengeance for the atrocities they did on Croats 1991-95. Our scores have been settled.

Nebojsa Malic left his home in Bosnia after the Dayton Accords and currently resides in the United States. During the Bosnian War he had exposure to diplomatic and media affairs in Sarajevo. As a historian who specializes in international relations and the Balkans, Malic has written numerous essays on the Kosovo War, Bosnia, and Serbian politics. His exclusive column for Antiwar.com debuted in November 2000.